1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a coin counting apparatus, and more particularly to a sorted coin counting apparatus for counting the number of various kinds of mixed coins made to fall into various selecting holes formed in the bottom of a flat coin selecting track, selectively in accordance with the kinds thereof, while being unidirectionally conveyed on the selecting track.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There have been proposed and developed a variety of such coin counting apparatus including that disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication 34084/1970. In this coin counting apparatus, the number of coins falling into each of various selecting holes is converted into electric pulses which are fed, respectively for the coins falling through each selecting hole as input pulses to the respective storage circuits of an operation circuit. Thus, the pulses for operating the indicating circuit of a counter are fed to the count memory circuit in which the pulses of the upstream selecting section are stored until they become coincident with those stored in the respective count storage circuits, so that the number of the coins sorted in each of the selecting sections may be counted from the difference between the number of the coins introduced into the selecting section under consideration and the number of the coins passing through the same selecting section. In the coin counting apparatus, moreover, there is provided a phototube or a photoelectric element in the selecting track of the counting apparatus. This construction results in the disadvantage that a dead space is established below each of the selecting holes and that the overall length of the selecting track inevitably becomes large because the counting mechanism has to be built in the selecting track. Moreover, another counting mechanism is required for counting the difference between the number of the coins to falling into each of the selecting holes and the number of the coins passing over the same.